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FACING A NEW DAY IN EVANGELISM
Dr. Carl F. H. Henry Chairman of the Congress

Greetings in the name of our great God, and hearty welcome to
the World Congress on Evangelism.

Three years of prayer and planning have brought us to these ten bright days.
Now the Christian world looks toward Berlin. It prays for signs of victory
and tongues of fire. It waits and watches for man-made walls to tumble --
walls segregating races, walls dividing nations, walls embittering social
classes. We who honor the God of the Bible are expected above all else to
expose the wall of hostility that parts modern man from his eternal Maker;
are expected to disclose how Jesus Christ can level this most distressing
of all barriers. And, so that together we may evangelize the earth, we are
expected to surmount the ugly barriers that separate us as believers.

For hours and days at a time -- in Chicago, in New York, in Washington, in
London, and in Berlin -- the executive committee has met in months past to
project a program and to invite your participation. Since January the Congress
coordinator, Dr. Stanley Mooneyham, has lived in Berlin, where our headquarters
staff handled hotel and travel reservations, corresponded with delegates from
more than 100 countries, and processed and translated assigned papers into
the four Congress languages.

Now in God's good providence we are safely gathered here from the ends of
the earth to tarry for ten days before we disperse again throughout the world
on a holy mission to a lost generation. This may be the last time in human
history that disciples of Jesus Christ are free to meet face-to-face on a
global basis for such a goal. Even now some of you occupy seats that were
first assigned to delegates unable to secure visas. Never in our lifetime
may human destiny depend as largely as in these days upon the vows and ways
of so small a remnant.

But we shall only reinforce a grave misunderstanding if, because of our individual
presence in Berlin, we congratulate ourselves as members of an international
all-star team of evangelists. One major weakness of modern Christianity lies
in its abandonment of the heavy burden of evangelism to a small company of
professional supersalesman. Our participation here is no occasion for self-congratulation;
it is rather a call to self-crucifixion. If any measure of prominence has
come our way, that may well be because twentieth century Christianity still
enlists "not many wise, not many rich, not many noble" -- otherwise
the covering cloud of witnesses might swiftly obscure us all.

Ten years ago a tiny band of dedicated laymen and ministers founded the magazine
Christianity Today to reflect the truth of the Bible into modern
life. The new magazine was maligned in some quarters, praised in others. Steadily
it made its way, until now in its class of readers it has the largest paid
circulation in the world. This Congress is a tenth anniversary project. Of
our quarter of a million readers, only one in two hundred is here present,
yet what happens in the generation ahead will depend fully as much upon those
evangelicals at home as upon us. Without them we shall ultimately accomplish
very little. The question that must haunt the conscience of every evangelical
believer is this: In view of the Great Commission, what does the Risen Lord
expect right now from me and from my local church?

Let me share a secret with you, lest as human beings we expect too much from
each other. Some months ago the religion editor of a leading American newsmagazine
telephoned me, and we must have talked for half an hour. He asked about the
"evangelical movement" -- how evangelicals can be infallibly identified,
and so on. One of his observations, made at a distance of a thousand miles,
still disturbs me, though it may not trouble you. He said. "They talk
a lot about apostolic Christianity, but when I look them over I'm not so sure
that is what apostolic Christianity was really like." Now, I am not telling
you something that some of us haven't said about each other. Let me assure
the speakers that a number of others nominated themselves for your particular
spot on the program; a few even considered it a travesty that some of you
were invited. Some wrote that the theologians have no business here, since
few of them know how to lead souls to Christ; others wrote that the evangelists
by themselves would quickly derail the Congress into doctrinal confusion.
Some rushed into print the self-promoting news of their inclusion as delegates,
and appealed for funds in view of this supposed world endorsement of their
particular organization. And some others, while they were kind enough not
to say so, surely wondered whether the Congress could possibly recover from
the liability of my own connection with it.

If you consider such asides regrettable in the presence of the press, let
me tell you something about my esteemed colleagues in the world of words.
They know us -- alongside apostolic Christianity -- better than we think.
If we have any virtue it is this -- that in a world that has lost faith, we
cling firmly to the faith of the Bible. This week, so help us God, may the
wonder of His grace so move in our midst that the world press may join us
in awakening to those momentous New Testament realities that once transformed
the earliest reporters of that sacred history into evangelists for Christ.
I am greatly pleased that some of the world's outstanding religion editors
are here with us, and I trust they will pardon my moment of autobiographical
musing. Some journalists, I know, considered this Congress a poor prospect
for news because there was no advance plotting of new mergers or new movements,
or of resolutions engaging the churches either as instruments of social revolution
or as arbiters of political controversy. There is ecclesiastical news nonetheless
in our keeping of full faith with the delegates, so that any declaration emerging
from this Congress must rise from the spontaneous will of the participants
rather than by predetermination of the sponsors.

This brings us to a candid word about our program. These days together assure
privileged access to influential evangelical leaders of scores of denominational
traditions in more than 100 nations of the world. Morning Bible studies, evening
inspirational addresses, evangelistic windows on the world, and daily position
papers are a built-in structure intended to prepare us for our main business.
The four-man panel discussions -- six of them scheduled simultaneously every
day -- serve as a stimulus to group discussion in which all delegates are
expected to share. Panel discussants will make their own free comments on
aspects of the position papers; some of the comments may seem brilliant to
the theologs but baffling to the activists, others may seem evangelistically
fervent but doctrinally flat. Some remarks will surely be controversial, a
few may even be pugnacious, and one or two downright impossible. I recall
a European doctor of theology who wrote that on only a year's notice it would
be impossible to prepare a ten minute statement for a panel. An evangelist,
on the other hand, submitted his paper so hurriedly that I am unsure that
even prayer and fasting could have helped it. Happily, many of the panel papers
are outstanding. Taken as a whole, however, they give me the impression --
and you must test this out for yourself -- that in these next years we must
strive harder to become theologian-evangelists, rather than to remain content
as just theologians or just evangelists.

It is well for us to remember what a dappled and diverse company we evangelicals
are. Let us accept each other as we are, justified but not glorified, knowing
only in part but rejoicing that we know Christ and have the light of His inspired
Word to correct us. Let us humbly and earnestly share our deepest convictions
and long for the might of God and the mind of Christ and the ministration
of the Spirit to be in our midst. From our private intercession, from many
small cell groups meeting for discussion and prayer, from brethren finding
brethren across traditional lines of separation, and above all, from the fullest
mutual devotion to the truth of God in the meeting of heart with heart, may
come that sacred moving of the Holy Spirit for which we yearn. May God be
pleased to impart a vision, strategy, and power to match the closing third
of the twentieth century. May our theme -- "One Race, One Gospel, One
Task" -- point the way to a new day in evangelism.

Let me voice a few convictions before I turn over the World Congress to the
leadership of our distinguished honorary chairman, Evangelist Billy Graham.

I am convinced that if we relate the biblical revelation to the cavernous
vacuums in modern life, the Creator-Redeemer God once again can fill our empty-souled
generation as a powerful reality.

But Christ's disciples need not wait in hiding for the right moment to shock
the world into its first glimmer of the supernatural, like a rodeo rider poised
astride his steed for a sudden thrust down the chute to lasso an unsuspecting
creature by total surprise.

We are not God's shock troops, serving as the first line of attack in this
battle for the minds and souls of fallen men. The Lord Himself "rideth
on a swift cloud" as Isaiah (19.1) declares, and the God of Heaven and
earth is no mere "night rider in the sky." He emblazons his presence
upon the whole creation. In the words of an Old Testament Psalm. "The
Heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament showeth His handiwork"
(19:1); in the words of a New Testament epistle, "Ever since the creation
of the world his invisible nature, namely, his eternal power and deity, has
been clearly perceived in the things that have been made. So they are without
excuse ..... (Rom. 1:20. R.S.V.). And John's Prologue tells us that the true
Light, the Logos, "lights every man" (1:9), that this Light "shines
on in the dark, and the darkness has never quenched it" (1:5, NEB). Man
the sinner does not walk in total ignorance of the Living God; what marks
him as a sinner is revolt against light, both in Adam and on his own
account. Deform God's truth as he may, he is wholly unable to extinguish the
light of divine revelation that illumines nature and history and conscience.

Despite man's universal spiritual revolt, the Living God daily
confronts the more than two billion
persons of our generation as a fundamental fact of their human existence.
The Cosmic Christ
goes before us, convicting a rebel creation that bears his marred image. The
Great Apologist
inscribes the case for theism ineradicably upon the souls of men. The Great
Creator is astride His
universe; daily He confronts and corrals every last man and woman with inescapable
reminders
of His power and deity and of the judgment to come.

It need surprise no-one that in Communist lands older people
believe in God.... nor that the very
young everywhere do, for no-one is born an atheist. Much of the university
world today no longer
presents the case for Christianity on its merits; Communist campuses caricature
the Living God,
while many Free World institutions simply ignore Him. For this superficial
disengagement from
the supernatural world our civilization already pays a terrible price both
in modern thought and
life. Another generation, its best minds aware of the reality and truth of
redemptive religion, will
rise up to judge our superficial age. That brighter generation may even now
be living in its teens,
waiting for the army of God to sound the trumpet of faith.

Not only does the Cosmic Christ still confront man daily, but
shattered remnants of the divine
image in man still impel him daily to reach for a recognition that the naturalistic
and atheistic
theories now so current cannot really nourish.

The clamor for human rights is a hallmark of our times. But
atheistic naturalism cannot sustain
the case for enduring and universal rights. Communist theory suspends all
human rights on the
sanction of the totalitarian state, thus substituting the absolute state for
the sovereign God. But
only the divine image as a creation legacy and redemption latency supplies
an adequate support
for human dignity, endowing man with universal rights and duties, and reinforcing
those rights
even against the totalitarian state.

Not only does the Cosmic Christ go before us as the Great Apologist
in our mission to mankind,
but now as the Great Evangelist also convicts the human race in advance of
our witness to the
world. The eternal Word became flesh, the Logos sacrificially stepped into
world history at the
Father's bidding. The rejected Redeemer has sent the Holy Spirit to reprove
the world of sin, of
righteousness refused, of judgment inescapable. Now He bids us, as His co-workers,
to take
worldwide the good news of redemption in His Name: "As the Father has
sent Me, so send I
you" (John 20:21). Thus He announces our integration with Him into the
redemptive covenant of
the Godhead, assigning us as ambassadors of reconciliation to stand between
a perishing race
and the living God.

So extraordinary is the "good news" of Christ's Gospel
that it can renew some of the lost dignity
even of the unbeliever despite his atheistic distortion of spiritual concerns.
What else reinforces
man's sense of personal significance as insistently as his need to prepare
for an individual
destiny in eternity? Time and again, the evangelical reminder that Christ
died for my sins and
that eternal separation from Christ is my prospect unless the new birth is
my portion stabs awake
the individual conscience so dulled by the secular forces of modern life.

If the machine age threatened to make man himself a mere impersonal
adjunct, the computer age
now threatens to dispense with him entirely. More and more the technological
revolution seems
to imply the insignificance and obsolescence of the individual. Social and
political forces of our
time likewise threaten the importance of the individual; Nazis elevated only
the Nordic race to
importance; Communists sacrifice the individual to the collectivity; Western
materialists reduce
man to a machine for multiplying mammon. Modern philosophy and scientific
theory both tend
to demean the individual. In its search for laboratory explanations the scientific
approach to life
overlooks individuality in order to emphasize the universal and predictable,
and thus minimizes
the significance of human decision. Our recent focus on the sub-human world
and on outer space
makes man seem but one of a trillion specks of animated matter in the vast
times and distances
of the cosmos.

But the Gospel reminds all men of an inescapable personal destiny
in eternity, based on a
conclusive decision in time. Jesus was always reclaiming men and women whose
sense of
personal worth and identity had almost vanished, and His redemptive power
is still potent in a
generation no longer quite sure of human dignity. By its urgent call to individual
regeneration
the religion of the Bible stands between the modern man and the daily erasure
of his personal
meaning and worth. It reminds every bearer of the debased image of God that
he must some day
stand before Him in whose image all godly men are even now being renewed.

But the Gospel of Jesus Christ does not remind men in a congratulatory
way of their personal
dignity and worth; it upholds the dignity of man by offering a recovery of
his squandered
destiny through the forgiveness of sins and a new life. The God of the Bible
is the God of justice
and of justification. The Christian evangelist has a message doubly relevant
to the modern scene:
he knows that justice is due to all because a just God created mankind in
His holy image, and he
knows that all men need justification because the Holy Creator sees us as
rebellious sinners. The
Gospel is good news not simply because it reinforces modern man's lost sense
of personal worth,
and confirms the demand for universal justice on the basis of creation, but,
also, because it offers
rebellious men as doomed sinners that justification and redemption without
which no man can
see God and live.

The fact that the Christian message speaks to the fragmentation
of the self and to the
derangement of society has also given rise to speculative religious theories
that seek to restore
the human personality or to promote social utopias, while they ignore the
utter indispensability of
the new birth for man's salvation. For several generations influential modern
churchmen have
ventured in Christ's name to reconstruct and revolutionize man and society
while they discount
the New Testament concepts of conversion and regeneration and reject the miraculous
elements
of the Bible, including our Lord's substitutionary atonement and bodily resurrection.
Perhaps
nothing attests the deepening apostacy of the professing Church as obviously
as the ready
secularization of the content of the evangel and of the mission of the church.

For good reason we repudiate the inversion of the New Testament
by current emphases on the
revolutionizing of social structures rather than on the regeneration of individuals;
we deplore the
emphasis on material more than on moral and spiritual betterment; and we renounce
speculation
about universal salvation that cancels new life in Christ as the precondition
of present blessing
and eternal bliss. What the Bible teaches, and what therefore we believe,
still has more force than
these popular ecclesiastical misconceptions.

But in these next days we must not simply deplore the evangelistic
paralysis of the ecumenical
movement; what the Church desperately needs is aggressive devotion to the
right option. In the
decade ahead we intend to proclaim the truth of revelation in full confidence
of God's redemptive
rescue of multitudes from many nations.

The early Christians knew themselves to be a new race -- a race
renewed, liberated from a
doomed humanity and called to rescue others. Is it any wonder that men who
have never been
born again seek to remake man and society simply by reshuffling unregenerate
human nature?
Can we expect the unborn to depict a birth which they have never experienced?
Recently a leader
in the fastest-growing denomination in the United States said: "Men need
not live their lives
away from God. Men need not live their lives burdened down with guilt. Men
need not live their
lives in wandering and aimlessness. God stands ready to receive us .... There
is forgiveness and
new life in Him" (Dr. Arthur B. Rutledge, in remarks to the annual Rome
Mission Board
conference in Ridgecrest, North Carolina, August 26, 1966). This emphasis
by twice-born men
on the Gospel invitation to the forgiveness of sins and the new birth can
stir multitudes to seek
and find redemption in Christ Jesus.

Lack of vital faith in the supernatural Creator and Redeemer
sooner or later means the terrible
loss of human dignity, of social justice, and of personal salvation. Outside
a rediscovery of the
Gospel of grace there now remains no long-range prospect for the survival
of modern
civilization, but only a guarantee of its utter collapse.

Is it too much for men devoted to Jesus Christ to pledge their
hearts and lives to a bold new effort
to give every man on earth in our time the opportunity to accept or reject
the Redeemer? In the
providence of God the staggering population increase coincides with the age
of space travel and
mass communications techniques. Do we have eyes to see new possibilities of
evangelistic
planning and witness? In the providence of God evangelicals of all lands and
races are being
drawn together across the ecclesiastical division of the recent past. Dare
we look for interracial
teams of evangelists who will circuit the earth in courageous confrontation
of whole
communities and nations torn apart by racial strife? In the providence of
God the liberal and
neo-orthodox revisions of biblical Christianity are now sunk in a sea of anti-intellectualism,
and
modern theology wallows in the mires of confusion. Are we ready to call the
student world to an
earnest searching of those rational evidences for theism of which their intellectual
peers for a
generation have deprived them, and as skillful theologian-evangelists face
these audiences with
the full claim of the Gospel? Is it too much to ask God to make this World
Congress an occasion
for so melting and moving our hearts that each of us gains a deepened passion
for winning souls
that launches the cause of Christ upon a new tomorrow?

Let it be said of us that when we gathered here the man-made
walls seemed formidable indeed,
but only until the Risen One walked in our midst to remind us that He was
crucified outside a
sacred wall, and that He sundered even the seal of the walled-in tomb in which
men laid Him,
though it was the seal of the mightiest empire of His day. May it be said
of us that we learned for
ourselves in Berlin that to Him who appeared to walled-in disciples fearful
of their
contemporaries, even huddled behind closed doors, man-made walls pose no impenetrable
barrier. Even as He showed the early Christians His hands and feet, and lent
them new feet to
carry the Gospel to Rome and beyond, new hands to minister to pagans forsaken
by their own
kin, new life in Christ that embarrassed the vocabulary of their day by its
lack of adequate
descriptives -- so let us know the presence of the Risen One who speaks His
commission anew to
each of us and breathes upon us the Holy Ghost.

The early Christians knew that walls solve none of man's dilemmas,
but only witness to man's
diseases and his need for God's salvation. They rejoiced in a Redeemer who
so renewed human
beings into a single new humanity that men forgot whether they were Greek
or Jew, circumcised
or un-circumcised, slave or free; Christ became to them "all, and in
all" (Col. 3:11). Their
mandate was the Risen Redeemer's commission, and the only reason the ancient
world rose from
and above its pagan mires lay in man's response to the Gospel they proclaimed.
Now, almost
twenty centuries later, when much of the modern world is again pagan, that
same concern brings
us together. That same Gospel offers to persons of all races and classes and
nations a fresh
prospect of dignity and direction, of hope and happiness, of purity and power.

At the outset I said that without the full cooperation of evangelical
Christians around the world --
of whatever color, country, denomination or ecumenical identification or non-identification
-- we
shall do little. Let me note in closing, however, that without the Great Commissioner
we can do
nothing at all. If we take the Great Commission seriously, we must take the
Great Commissioner
just as seriously: "He that believeth on me, the works that I do shall
he do also... Abide in me,
and I in you. As the branch cannot bear fruit of itself, except it abide in
the vine; no more can ye,
except ye abide in me ..... Without me ye can do nothing" (John 14:12,
15:4-5). It is tragic when
men who profess to serve Christ, in effect forsake the duty of evangelism;
it is equally tragic
when disciples who proclaim a devotion to the Great Commission try to "go
it alone." When
even theologians herald the "death of God," it becomes our double
duty to manifest in our
obedience the presence of the Living One.

Can we find for ourselves in these days what at first must have
seemed almost incredible even to
the early Christians, namely, that because Christ indwelt and transformed
them, those who
touched their lives acknowledged them to be a new race of men?

Will it be said of us: They came to Berlin pondering their individual
tasks in a world out of joint;
they returned like a host from heaven, unable to stifle their praise of Christ,
their thousand
tongues swelling into a single mighty voice, and their lives glowing with
the radiance of
messengers from another world?